Exploring the legacies of modernism and arte-povera as a way to open new paths and possibilities to address strength and fragility, the exhibition ‘Constructive Resistance’ addresses a relationship to private and public physical space as it is layered in the act of sculpting as a time-based process from which the elements stem as a concept of ritual within a complex economic and social structure addressing history and temporality.

The raw cranium-size chunks of extracted minerals (silver, gold and copper ore) sourced from 3 mines in the Peruvian Andes, create the basis for the work “Ejercicios para un Nuevo Nundo V.” (Exercises for a new world V).  The stones are drilled and attached to different, seemingly modular, sections of steel pipe armatures that are bent and molded to loosely represent outdoor rudimentary gym structures, of the sorts that are often found on public beaches or the S. American housing projects of 1960’s. Formally simplistic, they serve to contain these socially and economically complex mineral objects that have been carved and polished in certain areas as one would find in archeological sites-or sacred and monumental marble or bronze sculpture-that has shown its ware through the touch of the hands of many.  In this sense, as well, the highly valuable rocks (as related to the market value as precious minerals) that have been transformed into stones memorializes our fleeting presence on earth and plays into our collective drive to find ourselves somehow in the natural world.

 

Two wall works, “Paisaje/Repisa I-II” (Landscape/Shelf I-II) function as extensions of a form of painting made by copper plating over steel and then, in an alchemic process, adding the mineral dust extracts from the raw rock that has been carved in “Ejercicios para un Nuevo mundo V” into the electrified baths.   The protruding shelves hold images of bricks, almost pulverized through a process of natural decay, found in the desert, a copperized mold of a calcified tree found in the mine and some fragments of minerals that are either left in their natural state or have been destabilized by partially contemporizing the elements through the metal-plating process, playing with what could be original features or cultural accretions. To this extent the work plays tribute in large part to the works of  Jannis Kounellis from the 80’s into the early 90’s all “Sanza Titulo.”